Regular readers will remember Clabby Analytics and its chief prognosticator Joe Clabby. It was he who was touched by St. Fister in 2004 and cured of all Itanic wickedness. Itanium's apparent 2004 sales ramp and ISV embrace had turned Clabby into an EPIC believer.

Well, Clabby believes no more.

Where IDC championed the recent $10bn fund raising effort by the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA), Clabby, in a fresh report, has questioned how effective such an investment will be. He also urged readers to consider what Dell and IBM's abandonment of Itanium means to the chip's future, how ever improving x86 64-bit chips will challenge sales and how the RISC advancements made by IBM and Sun Microsystems will affect Intel's 64-bit dynamo.

Detractors will say that Clabby received funds from IBM for his initial anti-Itanium report and then got more funds from HP for his 2004 pro-Itanium report and is now back in IBM's pocket again with the new diatribe against Itanic. Frankly, we don't care.

For the latest version, be sure to visit Clabby Analytics. Clabby is the one in the middle.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Like a virgin, burned for the very first time

Taking strict airline "No Smoking" policies to new heights, Virgin Airlines has joined Qantas and Korean Air in restricting usage of many Apple and Dell laptops on flights.

Specifically, owners of Apple and Dell systems can't run them on battery power while flying, because the airline fears they pose a potential fire hazard....

Passengers can still bring their Dell and Apple laptops on board; they just can't run them with battery power. That means only customers sitting in Premier Economy or Upper Class seats, who have access to in-seat power supplies, will be able to use their systems....

The restriction is indefinite. "Virgin is in communication with Apple and Dell. As soon as this safety issue is resolved these restrictions will be lifted," according to the site.

I'm wondering how the airlines would react. On the one hand, many of their customers would be pushing them to keep these "time bombs" off of planes. On the other hand, their frequent customers would demand that they be allowed to continue carrying them. Perhaps the vacation airlines will panic and ban them.

When I wrote that, I didn't account for the fact that (some) business customers would be able to use their laptops without having to use battery power. Unfortunately, my usual business flights don't qualify for business class...

Monday, September 18, 2006

You think your software is old...

John Soat at InformationWeek was asking businesses about the oldest operating system(s) in their establishment. The winner:

"I am running DOS 3.2 on a NetWare file-and-print server. It's been running for 13 years--no Y2K patches, no hiccups, no beeps or bumps or blue screens of death in the middle of the night ... just keeps running."

And Soat found plenty of Windows 95, Windows 98, etc. systems out there. The explanations? Vertical applications, and no funding for revisions:

[M]ost responses referred to simply one or two systems, most running in small businesses or in niche areas of big businesses, like this: "We still have two computers running Windows 95 and one running Windows 3.1 for some old, specialty programs that we occasionally have to use."...

"We have government equipment that runs [specialized] software," wrote one respondent, "with no funding to upgrade the specialized software so it will work on a newer OS. There are several systems running each of these versions: DOS, WFW 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win 98se, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP, Server 2003."

Another explanation, which we saw with the DOS 3.2 app - if it ain't broke, don't fix it:

Representative of several responses was: "A touch screen point-of-sale system that runs under DOS 6.22." Another respondent said: "Still do my billing with DOS 6.22 on an Epson Equity II. Works just fine."

Surprisingly--or perhaps not--MS-DOS still has a devoted following. "Data recovery work is done at my little shop using DOS. Plain old DOS 6.0 works best for the way the app is programmed. And no, it can't work in a Windows DOS box, either."

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Dad is mad. Very very mad. He had a bad day. What a day Dad had!

I never thought I'd be quoting from DadTalk in the TechnoBlog, but this just illustrates how bad news travels fast (and how I'm helping it, I guess).

In a post entitled Why Dell Rhymes With Hell, Dad enumerated three (count 'em) problems that he's had with Dell in the last few months.

First, he ordered a laptop from Dell and was billed for three laptops and an incompatible expansion tray. Plus a restocking fee for the expansion tray he didn't order.

Second, he ran into some problems at his former job with the quality of Dell motherboards and capacitors - problems which Dell refused to acknowledge for a long time.

Third, he ordered a PDA for his wife (Inland Empress), never received it, and THEN found out that the PDA was out of stock.

His conclusion:

Of course, the reason we all buy from Dell is the price. It is pretty darn good. But three major problems with these guys is enough. So from here on out, I’m saying this: To hell with Dell.

A few months ago, I attended a Hewlett Packard event in which the speakers were hoping to catch up to Dell. Granted that HP has had its own problems, but even their negative news can be spun as positive:

Hurd, who has been CEO since April 2005, will become chairman on Jan. 18, HP said Tuesday. Current board Chairman Patricia Dunn will resign that post then, although she will remain a director.

George Keyworth II, a 20-year veteran of HP's board, also resigned Tuesday. Board member Richard Hackborn has been promoted to lead independent director.

The shuffle stems from a controversy over how HP tried to stop boardroom leaks to the press. The computer giant used sneaky — and possibly illegal — methods to obtain the home phone records of nine reporters and at least two board members.

The fallout threatened to rip apart the board. It plunged HP, a pillar of Silicon Valley, into scandal in less than a week. And it threatened to derail Hurd's attempt to turn around the computer giant.

But Hurd managed to simultaneously handle the crisis, get a promotion and lay the groundwork for bringing in new board members friendly to his style of governance. He "made the best of a bad situation," says Charles Elson, governance professor at the University of Delaware.

Monday, September 11, 2006

The OS war is being fought at the government level, in the state of Massachusetts, in various German cities, and now in Vietnam:

The Vietnamese Communist Party's decision to move its computer systems to open-source software got a boost on Friday from Intel, the world's largest chip maker.

Under terms of a memorandum of understanding signed on Friday, Intel will help the Communist Party's Central Committee for Science and Education (CCSE) set up a laboratory, called OpenLab, for testing and developing open-source software. Over the next three years, the lab will oversee the installation of open-source software on 27,000 PCs running Intel processors, the chip maker said....

Intel is investing heavily in Vietnam, which has emerged as a low-cost alternative to manufacturing in China. In February, Intel announced plans to build a $300 million test and assembly plant in Ho Chi Minh City. When completed, the Ho Chi Minh City site will be Intel's seventh test and assembly plant, joining the ranks of similar facilities in China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Costa Rica.

The Religious Wars of the Reply To Field

My contribution to the blogosphere is in the form of an anecdote.

I work for MegaCorp, a large company with thousands of e-mail users. One day, a few of these users decided to solicit participation in a volunteer effort within MegaCorp. So they created a mailing list, which I'll call mailinglist@megacorp.com. Out went the following message, early in the morning:

Join our Volunteer Opportunity, and you can enter a drawing to win a free MegaCorp WidgetPlus!

Wowee Neato!

Now, I happen to have changed some of the facts above. Obviously I've obscured the company name, the actual name of the mailing list, and the nature of the volunteer opportunity. I've also changed one other fact - the actual message wasn't a text message, but a formatted image message in excess of 200KB.

Some of you have already guessed how this story's gonna play out.

A couple of hours later, someone sent a message which, by the time I received it, looked like this:

So, since email was not a viable option at the moment (I was getting 1 MB of email every couple of minutes), I started researching the whole issue of the proper use of the Reply To field in email. The first salvo was fired by Chip Rosenthal:

An email message requires some amount of processing when it is redistributed to a mailing list. At the very least, the envelope must be rewritten to redirect bounces directly to the list administrator. While the message is being processed, the list administrator might take advantage of the opportunity to munge some of the message headers.

Some forms of header munging are helpful, such as special loop-detection headers. Others are questionable. Most are ill-advised or dangerous. Many list adminstrators want to add a Reply-To header that points back to the list. This transformation also is one of the most ill-advised.

Some administrators claim that Reply-To munging makes it easier for users to respond to the entire list, and helps encourage list traffic. These benefits are fallacious. Moreover, Reply-To can have harmful -- even dangerous -- effects. If you think Reply-To munging is a good idea, I hope I can change your mind.

After laying out his case, Rosenthal summarized as follows:

Many people want to munge Reply-To headers. They believe it makes reply-to-list easier, and it encourages more list traffic. It really does neither, and is a very poor idea. Reply-To munging suffers from the following problems:

It violates the principle of minimal munging. It provides no benefit to the user of a reasonable mailer. It limits a subscriber's freedom to choose how he or she will direct a response. It actually reduces functionality for the user of a reasonable mailer. It removes important information, which can make it impossible to get back to the message sender. It penalizes the person with a reasonable mailer in order to coddle those running brain-dead software. It violates the principle of least work because complicates the procedure for replying to messages. It violates the principle of least surprise because it changes the way a mailer works. It violates the principle of least damage, and it encourages a failure mode that can be extremely embarrassing -- or worse. Your subscribers don't want you to do it. Or, at least the ones who have bothered to read the docs for their mailer don't want you to do it.

An email message requires some amount of processing when it is redistributed to a mailing list. At the very least, the envelope must be rewritten to redirect bounces directly to the list administrator.

While the message is being processed, the list administrator might take advantage of the opportunity to munge some of the message headers. Many list administrators want to add a Reply-To header that points back to the list. This transformation is also one of the most useful.

Some administrators claim that Reply-To munging can have harmful -- even dangerous -- effects. I assert the opposite, that not adding a Reply-To header has even more harmful effects. If you think Reply-To munging is a bad idea, I hope I can change your mind.

Again, let's skip to the end:

SummaryMany people want to munge Reply-To headers. They believe it makes reply-to-list easier, and it encourages more list traffic. It really does both of these things, and is a very good idea. To reiterate:

It adheres to the principle of minimal bandwidth. It provides additional functionality to the user. It increases a subscriber's freedom to choose how to direct a response. It does not reduce functionality for the user of a reasonable mailer. It aids and assists the user with a deficient mailer. It adheres to the principle of least total work. It helps to ensure that questions are answered on the list. Your subscribers want you to do it.

After this morning's experience, I lean toward Rosenthal's opinion. So does neale:

"Reply-To" Munging Still Considered Harmful. Really.

An Earnest Plea to People Still Having This Debate

A long time ago, Chip Rosenthal wrote a fine document entitled ‘Reply-To’ Munging Considered Harmful. It details the problems caused by Reply-To munging. Chip’s essay basically points out that:

Munging only helps people with broken mail clients. Munging can catch people by surprise, since in every other email they’ve gotten with multiple recipients, when they hit “reply” it goes only to the sender. Munging totally breaks things for people who want replies to go to a different address than the one they sent the mail from. In 2000 (or maybe earlier), Simon Hill wrote a response called Reply-To Munging Considered Useful, which is frequently offered as a rebuttal to Chip’s document in online debates. Simon’s response boils down to the following:

Munging encourages list discussion. RFC 822 seems to indicate it’s okay. Munging makes things easier on broken mail clients. People still using these two documents to debate the issue are wasting everybody’s time. The issue was definitively settled in 2001, and Chip won....

Both Chip’s and Simon’s documents refer to RFC 822, “Standard For The Format Of ARPA Internet Text Messages”, issued way back in 1982, before most of us even knew what a computer network was. Indeed, RFC 822 doesn’t say anything about whether or not mailing lists can or should set the Reply-To header. Chip interpreted it one way, and Simon another.

In April of 2001, the IETF issued af new document, RFC 2822, which obsoletes RFC 822. In this new RFC, the author addresses the Reply-To header in a few places, but the most relevant to this discussion is the following in section 3.6.2 “Originator fields”:

When the “Reply-To:” field is present, it indicates the mailbox(es) to which the author of the message suggests that replies be sent.

Your list software is not “the author of the message”, so it must not set or in any way meddle with the Reply-To header. That header exists for the author and the author alone. If your list munges it, you are violating the standard....

This debate doesn't directly connect to the issue MegaCorp had, but it does illustrate the importance of a Reply To field.

Or, at the very least, mailing list opt in capability. Meanwhile, the list replies go on...

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Technology and Theology

Technology pops up in the most interesting contexts. Below I have reproduced an excerpt from a document issued by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod entitled "Public Rebuke of Public Sin: Considerations in Light of the Large Catechism Explanation of the Eighth Commandment." However, modern technology (as well as modern societal practices) results in the following question: what exactly is public today, and what is private?

In his commentary on the Eighth Commandment in the Large Catechism Luther spoke within the context of a relatively small community where people lived in close proximity to each other and routinely knew each other’s business. And in most cases, the community was identical to the local congregation....

The situation of the twenty-first century is very different. People in western societies in our day jealously guard their private lives. Much less of life is public now than it was in the sixteenth century, and most often members of a community know very little about each other. Therefore, any rebuke for sin, public or private, tends to be seen as an invasion of a person’s privacy. Even in LCMS congregations, we may hear that sin is a matter between God and the sinner only. Accordingly, the idea that an individual’s sin affects others in the community seems to have become increasingly foreign to many. The general failure to consider rebuke for any specific sin has led to the near obliteration of the distinction between public and private sin. In fact, we rarely need to consider this distinction because we seldom rebuke sin either publicly or privately. The end result is that most personal conduct tends to be regarded today as somehow private, a matter of concern only to the individual and to be judged only by God and his or her own conscience. The paradox of modernity is that the realm of the private has encroached even upon what is clearly public.

Modern communications media have also compounded the problem of what is public. Although we have enlarged the circle of what is considered private, we also have the ability instantly to make public whatever we wish through print, and especially through electronic media. E-mail lists, Internet chat rooms, and Web sites create possibilities for spreading reports that could not have been fathomed by Luther....

No deliberation at the local level is needed, when anyone can send an e-mail or post a rebuke on their Web site in response to a real or perceived sin. This situation creates some profound difficulties—not the least of which is that there is nothing in Scripture or the Confessions that justifies a public rebuke made unilaterally in the absence of conversation with others who are aware of the public sin (cf. Acts 18:24–26)....

Not only is it possible, but it is likely that a public rebuke will receive a wider audience than the public sin that elicited it. In other words, the rebuke has the side effect of publicizing the sin more widely, of making it known to an audience that had no prior knowledge of it. We must recognize that the number of people directly affected by a public sin might be limited. Although all members of the Synod are accountable to each other, in most cases it will only be necessary to deal with public sin at the local level. Publicity beyond that level may serve to scandalize more than to instruct. This observation should lead to a careful consideration of the audience for a public rebuke. It is neither necessary nor beneficial to involve all members of the Synod in every case of public sin. Those who would undertake a rebuke should take great care, therefore, in choosing their medium of communication and in determining their audience.